Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

“Thesba,” Nita said from right behind Kit, very soft.

He was glad she was so close, because (irrational though the sense was) Kit felt like he needed backup—like he’d never been so comprehensively loomed over by anything in his life. He stared up at this awful apparition and tried to imagine what it would have been like before everything started to go wrong here, when it was still quiet and benign; when it didn’t look like it was going to come to pieces right this minute and start raining itself down in fire and brimstone on your head. But his imagination kept coming up blank, images of what had been or might have been driven out by this terrible threatening now.

“It’s like… like it shouldn’t be possible,” Kit said under his breath.

“Yeah,” Nita said. The two of them stood there a moment longer, then let out a joint breath and glanced around. The others, just as transfixed as they’d been, were finally moving off the hex now: they followed them. “The orbital mechanics is weird,” Nita said under her breath. “The way their masses are balanced—the rotational speed and so forth, obviously it does all work out… though it definitely looks like it shouldn’t. We’re used to a moon that’s a lot further away, moves a lot more slowly…”

Kit nodded. There was a lot more to experience here—a thin chill wind laden with strange new scents and smells, a deluge of them, and a half-lit night edged all around with peculiar animal calls and many less identifiable sounds. But he was having trouble right now doing anything but ignoring the mental and spiritual weight of what hung in the sky above them. It seemed to Kit that the smartest thing to do at the moment was keep his eyes away from that: so as they made their way toward the edge of the gating slab and toward the small broad Tevaralti who seemed to be heading directly toward them, that was what he did.

“Cousins,” the being called to them, “you’re from Sol III—or Earth, is it? Which do you prefer?”

“Earth will do fine,” Tom said. “Dai stihó, rank-kin—”

Kit recognized a supervisory-level greeting intended for another of the same wizardly rank. “Well met in an ill time,” said the Tevaralti as he came up to them. He was broader and rounder than the Planetary, and was wearing the same kind of strappy-looking harnesswork; and he was shaggier-feathered, too, with a rounder, blunter face. “I’m called Vesh.” He crooked out an arm, bent at the feather-fringed elbow.

“Tom Swale,” Tom said, and moved next to Vesh and hooked his own crooked elbow through Vesh’s for a moment, then let go. “My associate Carl Romeo—” Carl followed suit. “These wizards with us are in our immediate and secondary supervisory groups, as well as sharing a vicinity locus.”

“Cousins, you’re all very welcome…” Vesh said, flicking his crest up at Kit and Nita and Dairine and Ronan in turn. “Let me orient you all briefly in place and time: you’ll have leisure for finer assessments for your own purposes when you’re settled by the gates you’ll be attending. This is one of forty main offplanet reception areas scattered around Tevaral. Its exact location’s been stored for you in your codices or other errantry-specific references for later use if you need to return to the Crossings in an emergency. But speaking more generally, right now you’re on the southern shore of the northeast continent, Chaish or Methneveh as it’s called in its primary languages. We’re halfway through the autumn months in this hemisphere, and about halfway through the local night. We’re asking you all to stay within call of this area for the next—” He paused, apparently searching briefly for a Speech-translation of the time interval into Earth idiom. “The next hour. Our transit circles to the population-rafting gates you’ll be tending are rather congested at the moment and we have to relieve that before sending you on.”

Everyone nodded or murmured agreement. “You two gentlebeings,” Vesh said, turning to Tom and Carl, “I was sent to brief specifically, as many more of your sub-supervisory wizards are here, and you’ll want to find some time once you’re settled to advise us as regards fine details of their assignments. For the rest of you, there’s a facility just beyond the gating substrate with refreshments and places to rest for a short time or erect your temporary-stay facilities if you like, while you wait for your further gatings. Supervisories?…”

He drew Tom and Carl off to one side, while behind everybody else the hex they’d vacated abruptly filled up with more incoming wizards, and other Tevaralti moved out to meet them. “Be nice to just get where we’re going and settle in,” Ronan said under his breath, looking around. “Pity we can’t just gate to wherever it is on our own.”

“I don’t think they’d thank you for that,” Dairine said, putting Spot down. “Too many gates open on this planet at once: you heard Mamvish. In fact I bet if you tried it, you’d find personal gatings are being disallowed…”

She glanced down at Spot, who was turning slowly in place, and then stopped, his stalked eyes fixed on one spot in the sky, distant over the hills. As long as it’s nothing to do with Thesba… Kit thought, watching Dairine as she too turned. Gonna take a while to get used to that…

At first he couldn’t see what the two of them were looking at, partly because there was a fair amount of low cloud over that way, clinging to the tops of the distant hills. But then through the cloud Kit got a glimpse of something. Aircraft light? he thought. Or some kind of satellite maybe?

But what he could see of it through the cloud was brighter than he’d have expected an aircraft light to be, and it didn’t move, just held still. And then the cloud gave way before it, and it leapt out sharp to see, distant in the darkness: a glittering shivering point of light, piercingly bright and deeply red, like a watching, baleful eye.

Kit sucked in a breath. It was a star. But it was so bright and so vividly colored that you were convinced you could see it as a disc, though he knew that would be impossible. “It looks like Mars,” he said. “But so much brighter…”

Nita came up to stand beside him, rubbing her upper arms because of the chill. “That’s the star I told you about: mu Cephei. One of the biggest and brightest red supergiants anybody knows about. Maybe the reddest star in this part of the galaxy. Possibly the reddest star anywhere in this galaxy.”

“Yeah, it’s real pretty, for all the good that does us,” Dairine said. “Just as well we’re getting these people out of here.” She was regarding the star with an expression that Kit found unnervingly expert. “Because that thing’s so massive that when it goes, it’ll go supernova, and there won’t be much left around here afterwards.”

“Not likely to happen now, is it?”

Dairine shrugged, and for some reason the casual quality of the gesture ran a chill down Kit’s spine. “Today? Naah, with wizardry we’d notice the signs from this close. Tomorrow? Doubt it. Next month? Next year? Who knows?” She shook her head as Tom headed back toward them, leaving Carl discussing something with Vesh. “Tell you, though, it’ll take more than a wizard to stop it. Or any crowd of wizards alive, because nobody’s got that kind of power. People have tried to keep supernovae from going off in the past. Mostly it makes it worse.” She looked up thoughtfully at the “eye” in the sky. “We’ll see it from Earth, though. About two thousand years after it’s destroyed everything in this neighborhood…”

“Probably,” Tom said quietly as he joined them, “that would have come up in the viability study before this particular rafting project entered the implementation stage. You’d think twice about committing huge amounts of energy to ‘heroic measures’ in order to keep a planetary system alive in situ when its medium-term viability is balanced on a knife-edge anyway…”